MASS PRODUCTION by Darren Soh

Mass Production an anthology of 17 architectural and landscape images documented from 2011 – 2014 by award-winning architectural and landscape photographer Darren Soh. Featuring images of grandeur and sheer scale, the title Mass Production speaks not only to the size of the buildings that Darren shoots, but is also a reference to their purpose – to house the masses.

The 4-layer cover designed by &Larry symbolises what architect Shin Takamatsu (himself a designer of grand structures) describes as the function of buildings – to protect its inhabitants. The structural quality of the cover also echoes Darren’s personal aim of making these images to preserve and immortalise the memory of these buildings when they are no longer around.

“Photography has the ability to freeze a moment within a frame and it is this time-stopping ability of photography that will enable us to possess a fragment of our built structures long after they are physically gone.” – an excerpt from Darren Soh’s afterword.

Darren Soh’s photographic practice explores architecture, urban landscape and space. An established photographer who is most recognised for his documentation of vernacular architecture, Darren has been placed in several international photography awards over the years, including the Commonwealth Photographic Awards, the Prix de la Photographie, Paris, the International Photography Awards, PDN and ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu. His works have been shown widely, including solo exhibitions at The Esplanade and Objectifs (Singapore Art Week 2015), and internationally at photography festivals like Noorderlicht (The Netherlands) and Obscura (Penang). He has published several monographs including While You Were Sleeping (2004), For My Son (2015) and In the Still of the Night (2016).

Darren was one of the co-founders of Platform.sg, an initiative to showcase photography of Singapore or by Singaporean photographers. As champions of local photography, Platform.sg has gone on to support and publish 22 Singapore photography books and most recently, an exhibition of 34 Singaporean photographers in Istanbul (Apr-May 2018). He continues to advocate for photography as an art form, and contributes actively to the community through frequent public talks and ground up projects that focus on documenting Singapore.